FDA Approves Drug That Uses Herpes Virus To Fight Cancer (nature.com)

An anonymous reader writes: U.S. regulators have approved a first-of-a-kind drug that uses the herpes virus to infiltrate and destroy melanoma. Nature reports: "With dozens of ongoing clinical trials of similar 'oncolytic' viruses, researchers hope that the approval will generate the enthusiasm and cash needed to spur further development of the approach. 'The era of the oncolytic virus is probably here,' says Stephen Russell, a cancer researcher and haematologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. 'I expect to see a great deal happening over the next few years.' Many viruses preferentially infect cancer cells. Malignancy can suppress normal antiviral responses, and sometimes the mutations that drive tumour growth also make cells more susceptible to infection. Viral infection can thus ravage a tumour while leaving abutting healthy cells untouched, says Brad Thompson, president of the pharmaceutical-development firm Oncolytics Biotech in Calgary, Canada."

Comments

Herpes, the love bug, rides again.

[rmdingler]

Nice. How novel is that? As ugly as a cold sore is, how preferential it might be to eminent death...

Re:Herpes, the love bug, rides again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice. How novel is that? As ugly as a cold sore is, how preferential it might be to eminent death...

The virus is modified to preferrentially attack only melanoma cells and not healthy cells so there minimal chance of getting a cold sore.

Caves

[anmre]

mutations that drive tumour growth also make cells more susceptible to infection

Interesting. Like cave dwelling creatures who've "lost" (by process of evolution) their sense of sight in order to enhance other senses. It's all good until some other creature invents a flashlight.

Re:Caves

[Chikungunya]

Maybe not exactly like your example but more like creatures that lost their ability to run fast by overeating themselves to obesity, let loose a few bears and the fit ones will have much better chances of surviving.

Cancer cells are in general very susceptible to infection, many times you can grow viruses in cell cultures coming from organisms that are not susceptible to that virus because the cultures are cancer cells. The problem is to make the virus lethal enough to kill efficiently the cancer but tame enough so the normal cells and organs are not affected too much. Similar to live vaccines but with a much more difficult balance to keep.

Old news

[just___giver]

I first posted this 13 years ago. Sad how long it takes http://m.slashdot.org/story/40...

Re:Remedies A go go!

[Adriax]

Herpes for Health. Curing cancer one night stand at a time.

I work with one of the authors!

[DaemonDan]

This is so cool! I work just down the hall from Dr. Kaufman at CINJ. His lab is one of the labs developing these herpes virus cancer therapies. My lab uses vaccinia, the smallpox vaccine virus, doing similar research (I'm also working on a melanoma model). We use GM-CSF just like this one, but also add in some tumor-specific antigens to increase targeting to the tumors. It's quite exciting stuff, and we even had a promising clinical trial against pancreatic cancer recently.